If you want the review queues to shorten, you can help! If you’re an add-on developer, please consider joining our team. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Test Your Add-ons for Memory Leaks!

There is an ongoing effort to track and stomp memory leaks in add-ons. Here’s where you can help, either by testing the add-ons you created, or testing the add-ons you use. Please read the article on Zombie Compartments, particularly the add-ons section. It should give you some pointers on how to find leaks and how to avoid them. The short version is: don’t hold any references to DOM objects after the document is closed.

With the resolution of bug 695480, whole classes of compartment leaks have been resolved on the Firefox side. This means that even if an add-on holds on to DOM references when it shouldn’t, they will be properly claimed. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t test and fix your code! This fix will be introduced in Firefox 15.

Firefox 14 and 15 Compatibility

Major change coming up in Firefox 17

The landing of bug 553102 made major change that can break compatibility for many add-ons. In a nutshell, if you set expando properties in JS objects in the content that point to chrome objects, you need to explicitly add the properties to the __exposedProps__ list of that object.

A deprecation warning was added in Firefox 15 (to be released soon), so you can test your add-on on Firefox Beta and see if the warning shows up in the console for you. If it does, you should update your code as soon as possible. Old versions of the Add-ons SDK are also affected, so all SDK add-ons should be updated to the latest stable version.